2008 Press Releases
17.06.2008
The English Department, in association with Triskel Arts, will host the 10th International Conference on the Short Story In English this week, June 19 – 21.
The Cork conference is named after Frank O’Connor’s study of the short story, The Lonely Voice. Many of the foremost short story writers of our time, including Edna O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, Robert Olen Butler and Bharati Mukherjee, will read from their work and, between writers and academics, the conference has attracted attract 200 delegates from more than 20 countries.
The Society for the Study of the Short Story was chartered in 1994, following a first gathering of people interested in the writing and study of short stories which took place at the Sorbonne in 1989. Later conferences were held in 1996 (Cedar Falls and Iowa City, Iowa) and in 1998 (New Orleans, Louisiana). In 2000, the conference returned to Iowa City, and was jointly sponsored by the renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop. The 2002 conference was held in New Orleans, and the 2004 conference took place in Alcalá de Henares (Spain), returning to Europe for the first time since 1989. The 2006 conference was held in Lisbon, Portugal.
About the Conference
Every other year the International Conference on the Short Story in English brings together writers and scholars with an interest in the short story, creating an unusual forum for a fruitful debate between the practitioners of the art and critical readers, coming from a diversity of fields and sharing a variety of interests. Writers and readers, bound by their common love for the short story, convene from all over the world. They are interested in exploring the ways and byways of an art that interconnects with other forms of literature as well as with other fields of art (namely photography, painting, cinema, music, and others). They also approach and discuss the variety of ways in which the short story is (and has been) embodied in history and geography, exploring the multiple interweaving links of production and consumption of literary works with the social, political, economic, and other issues relevant to a given time and place.
Attendees have come from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, and the Caribbean. Countries represented include Argentina, Austria, Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, the Canary Islands, England, Ethiopia, France, Guyana, India, Jamaica, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sri Lanka, Trinidad, and the United States.
Conference Permanent Director: Maurice A. Lee, University of Central Arkansas
Local Directors: Dr. Colbert Kearney, Chair, English Department, UCC and Ms. Ann Luttrell, Education and Community Manager, Triskel Arts Centre.
About the Topic
'The Lonely Voice' echoing the title of Frank O’Connor’s seminal work on the short story. ‘It is a lonely art,’ Frank O’Connor said. Cork City Library, where O’Connor began his professional career, republished this work to mark the centenary of his birth in 2003. Frank O’ Connor was a prolific writer, writing two novels, several volumes of poetry, translations, literary criticism and journalism but his favoured literary form was the short story. He wrote over 200 short stories, many of them published in ‘The New Yorker’. Despite the Irish backdrop to most stories, their appeal was international and many story collections are translated into numerous languages. See http://frankoconnor.ucc.ie
For further details and conference programme see www.shortstoryconference.com